


a christmas carol (in prose, being a ghost story of palo alto)

by iceberry, pippuri



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Christmas, F/M, Gen, Pre-Canon, Stanford Era (Supernatural), maybe less angst and more... haunting implications of fate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2020-12-16
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:41:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28117863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iceberry/pseuds/iceberry, https://archiveofourown.org/users/pippuri/pseuds/pippuri
Summary: As Sam looks at the photo of himself and Dean, he swears that it moves, a slight turn of the head from his younger self until the boy in the picture is looking right at him, holding eye contact as Sam startles a little and pulls his hand away. You're losing it, he thinks, composes himself and grabs the photo.It's still. Sam is looking at his brother and not at the camera; he rubs his eyes with his empty hand and looks at it again. It stays still, but he puts it back on the dresser face-down anyways.(alone at stanford, sam is visited by three spirits)
Relationships: Jessica Moore/Sam Winchester
Comments: 9
Kudos: 19





	a christmas carol (in prose, being a ghost story of palo alto)

stave i.

Sam was tired: to begin with. There was no doubt whatever about that.

But he had a headache too, and that's the bigger issue right now.

“I just don’t feel well, Jess,” he says as he shrugs off his jacket, lets it fall on the ground next to their bed. It’s never cold in Palo Alto, not compared to some of the winters Sam’s been through, but he feels almost _feverish_ now that he’s back at their apartment. “I’ve had a headache since that Religion department thing, I really don’t think I can deal with a party right now,” he’s trying to sound apologetic, hold back the urge to snipe as Jess follows him back into the kitchen, but his head is _pounding_ , and if he swivels his head too fast it takes his eyes upwards of 10 seconds to refocus enough to see anything more specific than colors and shapes. The party is _maybe_ his third concern right now, far below painkillers and a dark room.

“Are you sure?” Jess is frowning as she watches Sam dump acetaminophen out of the bottle, and Sam knows she’s not _mad_ , but can’t help but feel like he’s letting her down. “Babe, I can stay home with you if you want, I just thought—you know it’s our last chance to do something together before I have to go to my parents.”

He takes her hands in his and kisses her on the forehead. “Go to the party. I’ll take a nap, I’ll feel better once you get back. We can watch a movie or something together.” Maybe that's a weak consolation prize _,_ but Sam resolves himself to sit on the couch and stare at the TV screen for two hours regardless of how his head is feeling. He won't let her down. 

"Go have fun."

She beams back up at him, and pulls him down to give him a kiss on the cheek. “Feel better. Love you."

Sam stumbles into his bedroom the second Jess is out the door. He goes to turn the overhead light off, but sees movement out of the corner of his eye as he starts to turn away from the switch; a flicker of motion on top of the dresser. He turns the light back on. _A bug?_ he wonders, scrutinizing the items laid out on top of the drawers: Jess’s bowl of earrings, an assorted collection of rings, a crisp, bright photo of Jess and her parents at her high school graduation, a torn, creased photo of Sam and Dean as kids in front of Bobby’s house.

As he looks, the photo—he _swears_ that it moves, a slight turn of the head from his younger self until the boy in the picture is looking right at him, holding eye contact as Sam startles a little and pulls his hand away. _You're losing it_ , he thinks, composes himself and grabs the photo. It's still. Sam is looking at his brother and not at the camera; he rubs his eyes with his empty hand and looks at it again. It stays still, but he puts it back on the dresser face-down anyways. 

Sam climbs into bed, desperate to close his eyes and sleep and at least not have to _feel_ the headache for a bit. But he can’t stop thinking about the exchange he’d had earlier with Brady (who was only there because of an elective he’d taken in the department) after he’d shoved a plastic cup of punch or something into Sam’s hand with a grin, which Sam had acquiesced to and taken a sip of after goading and promises that it wasn’t alcoholic. “Dude, what’s in here, this tastes like _iron_ ,” Sam had said, making a face from the effort of trying not to spit out the bright red juice, and Brady had laughed at him and taken a sip out of Sam’s cup and shrugged and said he didn’t taste it. Sam had taken a few more sips, because besides the metallic aftertaste it wasn’t the worst, but now that he’s laying in bed with his head pounding he can’t help but wonder if all the work he’s put into repairing their relationship was worthless and one of his best friends just roofied him at a Religion department holiday party. 

It’s hard to fall asleep.

He lays there for at least another 5 or 50 minutes, staring at the ceiling and trying to run through the arguments in his final philosophy paper until he drifts off. At least he _thinks_ he does, but it’s a sleep so light and restless that when the opening of the bedroom door wakes him up, he’s not completely sure he was asleep in the first place. 

Someone is in the doorway.

“Who are you?” he asks, sitting up and reaching down beneath the bed to grab the baseball bat he keeps there. _It’s a_ _child,_ he realizes, squinting to make out the outlines of the figure in the dark. “Where are your parents?” 

“You know where they are,” the child says. “But why are _you_ here?” Sam rubs his eyes, and the child steps forward into the lamplight, revealing a slight ephemeral quality to his form, light shining through at the narrowest points - his wrists, his hair, his shirt where it's too big on him. “This isn’t where you’re supposed to be,” he says, emphasizing a point that Sam hasn’t even caught up to by the time he recognizes the child, looks back towards the photo on his dresser as though it will make any of this make more sense.

“You _can’t_ be me,” Sam says as he stands up and leaves the baseball bat next to the bed, looking around the room for iron even as he puzzles out that this _can’t_ be a ghost. “I’m alive," he says, and immediately begins running through a rubric of monsters in his head, checking off the boxes as fast as he can to try and figure out what he’s looking at. "I’m hallucinating.”

“This isn’t who you’re meant to be, Sam,” the hallucination says, not paying any mind to Sam’s protestations. "You know that, don't you?" 

"What was in that drink? Do I have a fever?" Sam asks, but the boy - _me_ , he thinks, feeling unreal every time he really focuses on his face from 10 years ago - simply stares back at him, countenance still but confusion in his eyes, like he was expecting a different conversation to play out. 

“You’re going to have three visitors before she gets back,” he says "Once every other hour."

“I’m dreaming about _A Christmas Carol_?” Sam asks; the question almost doesn’t make it out because he has to push past the impulse to laugh at that. He's still unsettled, still doesn't like looking closely at the younger self standing before him, but the absurdity makes it easier. Of all the dreams to have, of all the stupid ways this nap could have gone, this is maybe the dumbest.

“You don’t believe me,” he says, and he almost looks disappointed in Sam, who’s finding it harder and harder to focus on the mirage. His younger self doesn't dissipate or waver in the air, but Sam suddenly feels so, _so_ tired, tired enough that he almost forgets what woke him up in the first place. He stumbles back to his bed, only vaguely aware of the presence still in the room, and doesn’t remember falling asleep.

stave ii.

The alarm on his bedside table goes off, and Sam rolls over to turn it off without thinking, squinting at the red numbers—5:00 PM. It’s not until he swings his legs over the side of the bed and winces at his headache when he sits up too fast, though it is better than before, that he remembers it was 5:30 when he laid down, and he didn’t set an alarm. Everything is still, and maybe whatever was happening, whatever hallucination he was having is finally over—until he turns around, and sees there’s someone else in the room. 

A girl is standing in front of the window, no more than 12 years old, though there’s something distinctly un-childlike about the way she's holding herself. Blonde curls land on her shoulders, blue-grey eyes that are smiling just as much as her mouth is when she looks at him. 

“I’m the Ghost of Christmas Past,” she says, and Sam wants to roll his eyes at that, but he can’t look away from her nightgown. It’s old-fashioned and white, and a few inches too long on her, and it’s not _familiar_ but it makes him feel sick to look at, and the nausea is too strong for him to muster up enough sarcasm for that response.

"If I play along, will I wake up faster?" is what he manages to get out, and she holds out a hand. He looks at her, _hard,_ and she doesn’t seem like something he should be hunting. She’s just standing there, smiling at him like she knows him. Wary, Sam reaches out to her, takes her hand in his. She feels solid, human, and Sam’s back on the ‘dream’ theory. The room, suddenly, is warmer than his shitty radiator could ever get, and he looks up. 

“I remember this,” Sam breathes out, a smile spreading across his face automatically, and he can forget for half a second that he's just having a weird dream or a drug-induced psychotic break. He can’t _help_ but smile when he looks around.

The tree set up in Bobby’s living room is pretty sad-looking, bought from a guy down the street, decorated with chains Sam had sat on the floor and constructed out of newspaper and tape, and dimly lit by too-few strings of lights Sam remembers being electrocuted by when they put them up. But there’s a fire crackling behind Bobby’s desk, and over the radio, a woman’s warbly voice sings _O Holy Night,_ and it feels warm. 

“This is Christmas Eve, 1990. It was the one Christmas that Dad... he didn’t let us down.” He almost glances at the Ghost for confirmation, but he doesn’t need to, he _knows_ this moment.

There’s no surprise in what’s coming next, but still watches it with a glee he wishes he could repress, because he tries his best not to think about his family’s happier moments. Memories he remembers as snippets suddenly coalesce together in front of him: the woman’s voice belting out _“long lay the world, in sin and error pining”_ across the airwaves, sitting backwards on the couch and watching the snow fall into the junkyard through the bay window, the sounds of Dean and Bobby setting the kitchen table from a room over. A knock on the front door.

“Dad!” “Daddy!” Sam watches as his dad scoops him up in one arm, hugs Dean close to him with the other. Snow from the storm melts where Sam is pressed up against him; none of them seem to notice that the door is still open and the wind is blowing in. 

The Ghost waves a hand, the night speeds up, and all Sam can do is watch it pass by. He watches as they eat dinner together, sit by the tree while the adults drink, shake the boxes wrapped in newspaper their dad brings in from the car but tells them not to open till the morning, go to bed happy and late. Sam finds himself standing over his bed in Bobby’s cold attic, and time slows to something a little more understandable.

“I didn’t actually go to sleep,” he says, like the Ghost needs any explanation for what happens next. Sam watches his younger self toss and turn, and finally roll out of bed, careful to not wake Dean.

He follows his younger self halfway down the stairs, followed by the Ghost; he knows that these are just memories, his footsteps won’t change anything, but he still avoids the stair that squeaks, stepping over it with as much care as he did when he was a child.

“Do you remember this conversation?” the Ghost asks, and Sam shakes his head. His younger self hesitates on the stairs, and sits down just high enough that he’s out of the sightline of Bobby’s desk. 

“I remember going downstairs eventually, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying from here.”

“Are you sure?” she asks, and Sam peers across the hall into the room. “Why don’t you go and look closer.”

“I just want it to be over,” John says, and Bobby pours out more whiskey into the tumblr that his father holds out. “I just keep thinking it will be the last one, and then I’ll get a tip from you or Jim or Bill Harvelle, and...” John stares into his drink. Sam doesn’t like the silence he walks into, and even if this is technically his memory, albeit one forgotten for years, it doesn’t feel like he belongs here. “Monsters are easy, but fuck, killing _people_ …”

“I ain’t gonna say I agree with what you’re doin’,” Bobby says, and Sam half expects to see a flash of anger cross his father’s face, but instead watches him just slump back into his chair, weighty with resignation. “You’re killin’ good men to keep your boy safe. There’s no easy thing for me to say to that.”

“They’re not good men if they’re trying to kill my son. I can’t let any of them get to Sammy,” John says, and Sam’s blood goes ice cold. He can’t tell if John is trying to rationalize whatever’s going on to himself or to Bobby. “And you’re givin’ me names, Singer. Don’t talk like you’re not complicit.”

“John, you need to consider the worst case scenario here.” Bobby starts quietly after a second of mulling on that, and something about his tone makes Sam’s chest tighten, his pulse quicken - he doesn’t want to be here, he doesn’t want to hear this, he doesn’t want to know what Bobby’s about to say. “What if there’s some truth in the things these demons are telling hunters about Sam? About what happened to Silas? What if we’re killing these people ‘cause they’re right and we just don’t wanna believe it?”

"What things?" Sam asks out loud, and steps into the room. Neither of the men look up at him; there’s no recognition that he’s even there at all. He turns to the ghost, desperate, feeling like something has gone terribly wrong and the dream isn’t funny anymore. If it ever was. "This is just a dream, I don’t even have these memories.”

"Watch,” she says, and Sam realizes with a sinking feeling that he does, in fact, have the next memories. His younger self sneaks down the stairs, pauses in the hallway and tries to listen in for a brief moment before realizing he can't understand the conversation, and then sheepishly walks in.

"What are you doing up, Sammy?" His dad's voice is steady, maybe even warm. He was always a great liar.

"I just wanted to say thank you," the Sam-memory says, and Sam grips his fist so tightly he can feel the red half-moon marks his nails are cutting into his palm. “For being here for Christmas.” John reaches out his arms, and holds his son close to him for a long time.

“Why are you showing me this?” Sam asks, and turns to the Ghost as his younger self is shooed off to bed. 

"It's all laid out for you," she says, soft and matter-of-fact. "You need to stop running."

“I—why are you bleeding?” he gasps, any other response wrenched out of possibility as a red stain appears on the white expanse of the nightgown, spreading across her stomach, and the girl just gives him a sad smile. 

"Don’t worry Sammy, I’m already dead. I can’t die,” she replies, as if that explains anything, as if that makes this alright. She sounds so peaceful, and it throws Sam into a panic. “I love you, don’t forget that. Make my death mean something.”

He reaches out to touch her, grab her arm, find out if she's gonna be alright, and he’s back in Palo Alto. 

stave iii.

"In here," a voice calls, and Sam looks up to see the lights on in the living room, shining through the bedroom door more like sunlight than the fluorescents of their apartment. He shields his eyes and walks into the light.

The boy from before— _me,_ he thinks, but _no,_ I’m _me, just a dream, remember_ —is sitting on their couch, and he points the remote at the TV and shuts off some Rankin-Bass stop-motion special that Sam thinks he watched as a kid. The light subsides as the screen flickers off, and Sam can see clearly now that the boy is much more material now, solid enough that the cushion shifts when he gets off the couch.

“I’m the Ghost of Christmas Present,” he says, and Sam lowers his hand from over his eyes. 

"We already talked," Sam points out, and the boy—he almost looks too real for Sam to think of him of a ghost—tilts his head to the side.

"Did we?" he asks, and he sounds sincerely oblivious about their earlier conversation, which he thinks is more perturbing than if it seemed like the boy was messing with him on purpose. 

“Yeah, you told me—nevermind,” Sam says, trying to pull back from the impulse to explain himself to a dream. 

“Are you ready to see what comes next?” he holds out a hand, and Sam takes it, watching the boy’s face carefully as he reaches out. There’s no malice in the boy’s eyes, but there’s no warmth there either. The room distorts around them, the boy maintaining eye contact the whole time, like he’s unaware of the changes around him. 

And then they're standing in the corner of an apartment, a few feet apart from the mass of twenty-somethings drinking and laughing. Christmas music is blasting from some speakers being held together with duct tape, at least three couples are making out, blind to the rest of the world around him. Sam knows this apartment—not well, but well enough to know that this is where he and Jess were supposed to be.

“I don’t need to see a party that I’m skipping,” Sam insists, and the boy looks up at him.

“Don’t you, though?” he points across the room, and Sam sees Jess leaning against the wall, smiling and laughing. She has a solo cup in her hand and a Santa hat close to slipping off her head, and Sam manages to push aside the deep-set unease that’s set in long enough to let himself smile at her.

He drifts close enough to hear someone, maybe Luis, ask where he is, and to see the apology in Jess’s smile. “He wasn’t feeling well,” she says, and she says it so sincerely it makes Sam’s chest ache.

“You’re unclean. Do you think she’d love you if she knew?” The boy says, his voice somehow genuinely curious. 

“What?” Sam looks down, but the boy just keeps staring at Jess. 

“Well, she’ll find out eventually,” he says, and finally looks back up at Sam, unblinking. “Do you think you can run from something that’s inside you?”

Sam opens his mouth to reply, but the boy just tugs on his hand. “Come on. We have somewhere else to be.”

The party melts around him, and suddenly—suddenly Sam is in the backseat of the Impala, the boy next to him. The spirit is older now, maybe twelve or thirteen, his face changed into the familiar angles that Sam remembers looking back at him from his middle school yearbook photo. He’s unsettled by the changes he sees in the spirit; it bothers him more than the transformation of the setting does for some reason.

In the front seat, his dad is driving, his knuckles white on the wheel, and Dean’s got what looks like blood drying in his hair. “That’s the _thing_ that killed your mother, boy,” John says, his voice short and acrid. “Everything we ever wanted,” and Dean looks helpless. The whole scene is dizzyingly familiar, except: it shouldn’t be Dean that their dad’s glaring at. 

“I know, sir,” Dean says, and he’s more polite even when fighting than Sam ever could be. “I just think we should have warned that family.”

“And let it get away?” 

Dean slams his hand into the dashboard, and the boy next to Sam twitches a little. Maybe it’s dark, maybe the boy is even older now, fifteen or sixteen. He can’t really tell anymore. 

“It got away _anyways_ ,” Dean hisses. “Two people are dead, and we’re no closer than we were yesterday. Fuck, we’re no closer than we were twenty years ago. If Sammy were here-” 

It’s the wrong thing to say. 

John abruptly pulls the car over to the side of the road, leans over Dean and opens the passenger side car door. “He’s not. He made his choice, and it wasn’t you. Now get the fuck out of the car.” Dean looks incredulous, but their dad just stares out the front window. “I think you need a little time on your own,” and Dean slowly reaches down to get his backpack off the floor. 

“Follow him,” the boy says, and Sam wasn’t really planning on doing anything else, but fumbles with the door and climbs out. It’s cold out, and Dean watches the Impala speed away. 

“Merry fucking Christmas, Dad,” Dean mutters, and the boy next to him pulls on the sleeve of Sam’s hoodie. “It’s time to go,” he says. 

“But -” Sam motions to Dean. “I can’t just -” Sam turns to the boy. He’s not a boy. Not anymore. He takes two of his fingers and touches Sam lightly on the forehead and Dean disappears, the road melts away and Sam is standing in the bathroom, staring at his own reflection in the mirror, two fingers pressed to the smooth glass. 

stave iv.

There’s no question of if he’s alone this time, he knows he’s not. He looks over to the bedroom. The third Spirit is standing there, towering over Sam's side of the bed, draped in dark robes, features hidden. There’s no introduction this time; _Christmas Yet-to-Come_ , he thinks to himself.

“Just let me wake up,” Sam begs the creature as he approaches it. It’s a few inches taller than him, even hunched over, the black cloak covering everything except a single hand. It stretches the hand out and beckons for Sam to walk away from the bathroom, towards it. He does.

It points to the bedroom door silently. “I just want to wake up,” Sam repeats, but the Spirit doesn’t move. He glances over at the bedside clock; the numbers read 9:00. The Spirit points once again.

He opens the door, and he’s standing on the threshold of a dining room. It’s not a _familiar_ dining room, but it could be any dining room in any middle-class suburb in the country, with a long wooden table and the _nice_ dishes set out for Christmas; candles are lit on the sideboard and there’s some kind of spruce centerpiece on top of the tablecloth. He’s hit with the scent of something sweet baking in another room, the savory smell of turkey on the table.

And there’s Jess. Older, hair a little shorter and pulled back, but that’s her, still beautiful and still warm and smiling as she serves food onto the plates of the two children sitting at the table.

“Jess,” he breathes out, not really meaning to. She predictably doesn’t react, and somehow it feels worse than Bobby and his dad not hearing him. Jess notices something through the window, puts the serving spoon down, and turns around; Sam almost lets himself slip and think that she’s turned to look at him. The front door opens, and a man walks in, snowflakes on a dark suit and briefcase in hand. 

“Hi, babe,” she says to the stranger, and Sam feels a deep sadness at the love he hears in her voice. He glances down at her left hand, can’t help but stare at the gold band, the way it catches the candlelight. “You made it in time for dinner.”

“Why aren’t I here?” Sam asks, voice still barely over a whisper. He gets the gist now, it’s not going to answer him, but he feels a need to ask. To at least point it out.

"Found one last straggler in the mail," the man says, and hands over an envelope to Jess as he shrugs his coat off. "From your old college friend, Sam."

Sam watches, rapt, as Jess pulls out the Christmas card and reads it. A small smile appears on her face, fond but distant. Sam peers over her shoulder to look at the card—professionally printed, on cream paper with nothing personal to break up the gold typesetting. Not even a signature. 

"That was nice of him," the man says, though he sounds unconvinced by his own words. Jess is already placing the card in a basket full of them; just one of dozens, and less meaningful than most. 

"I'm sure he’s spending the holidays working again," she says with a sigh, and there’s genuine sadness, maybe even pity, there. "He was never a fan of Christmas. Or any other holiday."

"Doesn't he have family?" 

"Last time I talked to him about some alumni thing, it sounded like they were still estranged. They have been as long as I’ve known him."

 _Still estranged_ ? Sam’s eyes widen. _What year is it?_ But the year doesn’t matter, not really, which is why he doesn’t ask it out loud even though there’s no real risk to getting an answer. This—the table, the children, the suit and briefcase, the boring-ass _perfect_ house that looks like every other house in a quiet neighborhood—this was supposed to be his and Jess’s. _It still will be,_ he thinks to himself, though it’s getting harder and harder to cling to the reality that this is a dream. 

“This isn’t how it’s going to be,” he insists, and the spirit silently points to the front door. "I'm gonna be part of this. I’m not going back to the way things were."

He glances once more at the table, though the conversation just sounds like rushing in his ears now, and watches Jess laugh at something one of the children does. "I’m _not_ ," he repeats, for himself.

The door handle is cold to the touch, and he walks out of the suburban house onto Bobby’s porch, a night just as cold as the one from before but without any snow to soften the harsh angles of the junkyard. His dad and Bobby are standing in the yard, backs to the house, facing a pyre. 

Sam walks up behind the two hunters mechanically, puts one foot in front of the other and doesn’t let himself think about what he’s walking towards. He’s close enough to smell the whiskey on them through the choking scent of smoke.

“Should’ve at least called Sam,” Bobby says, and shoves his hands in his pocket. His eyes don’t leave the pyre. “Given him a chance to say goodbye.”

“Bobby, shut the fuck up,” John says, and he says it cold as a Sioux Fall winter. There’s no yelling, there’s no heat in his voice. It’s all quiet and resignation and it’s the scariest Sam has ever heard him. And Bobby does shut the fuck up, pulling out his flask and drinking from it instead of pushing John any further. When he’s done, he passes it to John to take a sip from, but there’s no ease, no affinity between old friends in the action. 

Sam knows he wasn't brought here to watch Bobby and his dad drink.

He takes a step towards the fire, the shape of the shrouded body clearer. “Who is it?” Sam whispers to the spectre, barely able to get the words out. He knows the two hunters can’t hear him, knows that this dream is even more tenuous than memories when it comes to closeness to reality, but the silence between the two men is so strained that he feels like _any_ noise will snap it. He looks up at the Spirit, who simply points. He takes another step.

“I just want to wake up,” he says, looking for an out. It points. He takes a step.

He stops, turns on his heel. “Please,” he says, and he hates the way it sounds like he’s begging. “Is this real? Is this going to happen, or is it just something that might happen?” 

Still, the Spirit points downward to the pyre, the flames and the smell of burning flesh. 

“Even if this is true, I don’t know what you want from me,” Sam says, and looks up at the Spirit defiantly, as if this time it would explain itself. It just points.

He turns, and steps close enough to see the body.

"You’re lying,” Sam chokes out. He has to say it, because it has to be true, and maybe saying the words out loud will make it true. “Dean wouldn’t—he _can’t_ —my dad—” he’s frantic, trying to get a single sentence out and failing every time because that’s Dean’s necklace laying on top of the pyre, the one he wrapped in newspaper and gave to his brother in Broken Bow all those years ago and now it’s laid on top of a burning body and it’s just a dream, a nightmare, it’s not the future, it _can’t be_.

He turns around to confront the spirit, but freezes in place at the sight. The flames illuminate the inside of the spirit’s hood just enough for Sam to see his eyes, bright pools of yellow looking out from the dark. It looks _right_ , lit up like that by the pyre, and there’s something, a memory, a dream, scratching at the back of his mind. Sam opens his eyes, the ceiling of his bedroom impossibly bathed in firelight. 

  
  


stave v.

It takes him a moment to find himself again. Regaining awareness of his surroundings is slow, uncomfortable. He becomes aware of Jess’s body pressed up against his back, but it feels wrong; they don’t fit together the way they normally do. He slowly rolls over to face her, faces inches apart.

“Hey,” she says with a smile.

“Hey,” he says back, and she’s smiling so sweetly that he feels guilty he can’t reciprocate. “What time is it?”

“7:30,” she says, and Sam’s brain scrambles to make sense of that, of the clock that he _swears_ said 9:00 the last time he saw it. “I left the party early. It wasn’t as fun without you.”

 _This is my life_ , he thinks as he rolls out of bed. _It is_. No dreams can take that away from him. Sam takes more acetaminophen and sits next to Jess on the couch. Judy Garland is singing _Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas_ on the television. He can almost convince himself that it feels right.

**Author's Note:**

> this fic has truly been a labor of love and an incredibly fun collaboration that we both feel INSANE over in a good way!! we would like to thank the cast of a muppet christmas carol and phoebe bridgers christmas album. also charles dickens, we GUESS
> 
> some of the plot choices in here are taken from small bits of the show/other media - the future scene of sam working through the holidays was inspired by 14x13 lebanon, and the stuff about john killing hunters to keep sam safe is from the comics. 
> 
> comments and feedback are always great, and thank you SO much for reading!


End file.
